Pod. Weird word that you may have seen mentioned in blogging groups, but don’t know what it’s all about. There are pros and cons to joining a pod for Instagram or your blog, and we’ll go through them as well as explaining how to get one started.
The most popular type of pods are Instagram or blog commenting ones. Pods are where a group of people will like and comment on each others posts or photos to artificially inflate any engagement statistics. Many PR companies and agencies will use things like the amount of likes you get on an Instagram post or the amount of comments you get on average as a way to quantify your value to their clients, so by working with others to increase this on your accounts, you look more attractive to potential collaborators.
There are three ways to run a pod:
- Adding everyone to an Instagram group message (with a maximum of 15 members in one group), and posting whenever a new image/post is uploaded. Everyone can then go and comment/like it.
- Adding everyone to a group message, and having them turn on new post notifications in Instagram or Bloglovin for everyone in the group to remind you to go and comment/like it.
- Creating a private group on Facebook, and either getting everyone to post when they post something new, or having a thread for each day so you don’t have tons of notifications.
You can set requirements for the pod – e.g. that your comment is at least 5 words long (some people believe that comments with more than 4 words are less spammy looking), that you don’t just comment “love this!” or a load of emojis, or that you tailor the comment to the image. When you’re commenting genuinely (when you just comment on a post because you want to comment), then you’re likely to do these things anyway, so having them as requirements just means you’re less likely to get those generic comments you probably get all the time.
The good thing about a comment pod is that it works against the dreaded algorithms that push down your posts for not having much engagement on them, so even by having a small group, you can boost how many people will see your posts. However, there’s always a possibility that the algorithms will be adjusted to take into account these sort of tricks, and could be a negative thing.
What do you think – are pods a good idea?
